PHP vs ASP/JSP/Lasso/CF Report help

Anon

Hi,
I really hope that the great community of PHP can help me here.

I am currently with a development team going to start work on a whole string of web-based products, which ranges from e-commerce to client software-server interaction to content manangement. The team has a strong background in C++ and some of the members, including me, have done some personal developments in PHP. We talked over it and decided PHP would be a our best choice over other technologies.

Now this is where the problem comes in. My boss wants us to use more "established" technologies, namely, ASP, JSP, Lasso and CF. He would let us use PHP on the condition that basically, the team has to come up with a report about the benefits of PHP and why we should be using it instead of the others. I can see that his main worry is about the fact that PHP is free and open-source. I can openly admit that my boss has shallow knowledge about these technologies, but he is still a good boss. Here is a breakdown on HIS main reasons of wanting other technologies:
ASP - Backed by Microsoft. Most sites use it, and probably will never "die". Very established and to him, its the "in thing". Must pay for it.
JSP - Backed by Sun, another big company. Since Java is so renowned, this must be good.
Lasso - (no idea how he picked this) Looks good and since you must pay for it, it should be good.
CF - Backed by Macromedia. Very established too. Must also pay for it.
PHP - Free and open-sourced. Scares him.
In summary, he just trusts a technology which you must pay for.

I've included points that PHP is free, good DB interaction, powerful, etc.
I really hope that you guys can help me come up with some really good points to include. If we get to use PHP, I will be forever in debt to the PHP community.

Thank you.

Ron Baker

PS. I also have one post in the General Forum.

chowdary

Hi,
Read this Article on "Why PHP is better choice than Java"

  http://www.zend.com/zend/art/php-over-java.php

Cheers
Ajay

Anon

Hi.

I am long time web developer and PHP professional for about 1 year. I have some thoughts about what to say to your boss.

Shoot him, but that might not be an option 😉

Now for the serious stuff.

ASP vs. PHP

First of all what should convince your boss not go with ASP is that he will be selling his soul to MS. That is, once you have your e-commerce platform build, you will never again be able to leave Windows 2K/XP, which in turn means that you will get stability problems once your business reached a certain size. Our company switched from ASP to PHP a year ago, and we have never looked back.

JSP vs PHP

JSP is a pretty cool technology and is heavily OO'ed which can be a good thing, if you have the programmers with OO skills. Contrary to what Sun would have you believe,OO is not some sort of magic wand you wave around and all your software engineering problems vanish. But you mention that your team has a strong background in C++, so it should pose no problem. Basically I think JSP is pretty okay. But remember that you are still married to a large company that will eventually screw you over (they all do in the long run)...

Lasso vs PHP

Our company have been using Lasso internally for years and there has been nothing but trouble. It is an incredibly slow language and very cryptic to write if you are used to C/C++/PHP/Java or Perl. And we have so much trouble getting it to run without resorting to ODBC for DB access. Believe me this is not an option

CF vs. PHP

Somebody please pick this one up, I know nothing of Cold Fusion.

Besides if your boss gets to make tech-decisions like that, then you should probably reconsider the roles of the tech people in your company.

Last year a new policy was implemented: Techs make tech decisions and managers tells techs how they want it to work.

Hope that helps.

Feel free to email me for further advice or a healthy discussion.

ame12

See my response to you in the other forum. One thing to note regarding JSP... I have yet to find a JSP site that performs even close to PHP. eWeek's benchmarks showed PHP over JSP by a factor of about 3 to 1! No contest.

PHP is growing faster than any other app server technology (source: netcraft). The list of companies supporting it is very impressive (see the message I posted to your question in the other forum). You can't do better than PHP... and if you n-tier, just use servlets or ISAPI or some such which PHP can easily marshal by making HTTP requests and parsing returned XML.

Dave

===========================================
http://badblue.com/helpphp.htm
Free small footprint web server for Windows

PHP, file-sharing, Access/Excel transcoding

Anon

Thanks a lot guys!
Some good points there to add to my report.
"Techs make tech decisions and managers tells techs how they want it to work." Maybe I should include this too.

Good point about OO Michael. My boss too also thinks that OO is the solution to everything (although I don't think he knows exactly what the hell it is), probably thats why JSP came into his mind. Seems like Lasso sucks real bad. To tell you the truth, I haven't heard of Lasso till my boss mentioned it.

To clarify some stuff to other people out there. CF(Cold Fusion) is a tag-based language like HTML. I don't even touch tag based languages (except HTML for interest). However I still need to prove to him the PHP is a better choice than CF, further more with CF being well known, fast and all that.

Once again, thanks!

Ron Baker

Anon

I work for a Coldfusion house, but do all my personal programming in PHP. There is no comparison. Let us first consider that Macromedia has just dropped support for Spectra, Homesite and Jrun, three of Allaire's premiere dev packages. Coldfusion won't be far off.

Secondly with Coldfusion you are married to having to use ODBC or JDBC database connections. Forget about using MySQL or Postgre.

Thirdly Coldfusion does not support true OO style programming. You can't write your own functions! God knows why they did that. Forget classes or anything that even smacks of real programming.

PHP is 10 times more robust than CF in so many ways I can't list them all here.

Fourth, Coldfusion liscenses are EXPENSIVE. Coldfusion support leaves a lot to be desired as well, especially now with Slackromedia running the show. PHP open source support is much more extensive and growing daily.

Hope this helps.